Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday September 13, 2012 @10:36AM
from the move-over-duct-tape dept.

First time accepted submitter halightw writes "Scotch tape really can fix anything according to a new study where it was used to induce super conductivity by taping two pieces of material together. A "proximity effect" occurs when a superconducting material is able to induce superconducting behavior in a second material — a semiconductor that does not typically enjoy superconductivity." All that and X-rays, too. Related: An anonymous reader writes "Scientist at University of Leipzig in Germany claim to have measured room-temperature superconducting in specially treated graphite grains. The measurements were reproduced independently before the announcement was made. More tests need to be done to verify the extent of superconductivity and whether the effect can be extended and scaled to be practical."

Just because they might be at the cutting edge of scientific progress does not mean common household goods, that were once thought of as perhaps as innovative as superconductivity, cannot be useful. Maybe I am stretching things in this case, perhaps they should have used duct tape. Anyhow, there must be other examples of this kind of thing?

I remember the 2010 Nobel prize winners in physics also used scotch tape to produce graphene, by peeling layers of carbon off of graphite:http://motherboard.vice.com/2010/10/7/physics-nobel-prize-winners-secret-scotch-tape--2

The glass slides in the experiment contained silica, the same common material in sand across the globe.

There hasn't been any press release yet, but I suspect the scientist's underwear was made of cotton. That's right, the age-old textile material cotton has now found new use in the field of scientific research!

Also, we're still waiting on confirmation that the building's electrical wiring contained copper, but there is speculation that it may have been contaminated by other metals, complicating the analysis.

So the really interesting part of this story - that superconductivity can be induced in high-temperature materials that haven't been grown in proximity - is completely overshadowed by the tape that held the experiment together?

So the really interesting part of this story - that superconductivity can be induced in high-temperature materials that haven't been grown in proximity - is completely overshadowed by the tape that held the experiment together?

You are very right. A superconductor that's workable on a large scale would probably tip power infrastructure globally towards electricity. Imagine a few hundred square miles of wind turbines in West Texas providing clean, affordable energy in California.

Especially if your transmission capitol cost go up an order of magnitude, it may well be cheaper to just live with the 10% lose (is it really that high?). Electric motors and generators are in the same boat. They are already in the 90%+ range. Power density would be a bonus.

The problem as far as I can see it is that a gravity/time module written in an entirely different language has been hacked together with a system that uses variable variables for everything. The inflation plugin looks like it was jammed into the header file at the last moment, and the hardware requirements for the singularity class methods is just stupid.

Don't get me started on the fact that 94% of the source is logic-sensitive whitespace.

So the really interesting part of this story - that superconductivity can be induced in high-temperature materials that haven't been grown in proximity - is completely overshadowed by the tape that held the experiment together?

Fuck journalism.

I think you mean... that superconductivity can be induced at high-temperatures in materials that haven't been grown in proximity... And yes I find that far more interesting than using tape to accomplish it. Generally superconductivity dislikes material boundaries. This is why crystal grain boundaries (paradoxically) help control superconductivity in thin-film YBCO and similar high-temp materials by preventing eddy vorticies from interfering with flow. I had no idea you could induce superconductivity in a different crystal through proximity. in fact all of the knowledge I have on the subject (I did my graduate thesis on YBCO thin films) tells me it shouldn't be possible.

That is what I meant. That sentence was mangled several times while revising, and apparently I posted a few revisions too early.

Technology-wise, this is an interesting discovery. It would have been equally interesting had the scientist used fly paper or chewing gum to hold the semiconductors together. Once upon a time, this site claimed to offer "news for nerds"... let's not water down the nerdy science with the lowest-common-denominator amazement that versatile materials have many uses.

How do you induce superconductivity with a proximity effect? My understanding of the phenomenon is that it is basically a specific quantum state allowed to electrons that directly depends on crystal structure (hence the temperature dependence). This is not unlike semiconductors where we rely on a manipulated band-gap to effect alterations in the conductive properties. More interestingly, superconductivity generally doesn't exist where magnetic fields do (there are macroscopic exceptions, but physically when

> So the really interesting part of this story - that superconductivity can be induced in high-temperature materials that haven't been grown in proximity - is completely overshadowed by the tape that held the experiment together?

If this result held, yes this is big news, but I remember of the "high temperature superconductivity fashion": quite a few of these experiment reported success but could not be reproduced: measuring supercondictivity is *hard*.So I'll wait until it is properly reproduced and meas

So, just because they're researches, should they have applied for a government grant to invent some exuberant, overpriced, adhesive tape to be used in that particular experiment exclusively?

This is Canada, we need to be more cost effective and responsible with tax-payer money. Your options are scotch tape, beer, Tim Horton's coffee, moose droppings, and snow -- and in most of the country, the snow is only actually about 4 months of the year contrary to popular belief.

Yep, totally agree. the scotch tape superconductivity is helping superconductivity work at 80 Kelvin. The Carbon soaked in water, then dried is superconducting at 300 fucking kelvin. No scotch tape required! The cool thing about this is, if true, you could verify it in your kitchen.

I don't think we'd want LEDs that are superconducting. That might lead to very little light emission as we need the power to be lost to electron holes to generate photons. What we'd ideally want are LEDs that are better at converting energy into light. Superconductivity seems counter-intuitive to that.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but since we've never had superconducting LEDs, we don't know how they'd react.

Now super-conducting diodes, those would be awesome. Much better control of power flow. Could we

The cool thing about this is, if true, you could verify it in your kitchen.

Not really, the superconductive spots are tiny, far too tiny to actually measure resistance across. The researchers are claiming superconductivity based on magnetic effects, which while very interesting, isn't exactly something you'd do in your kitchen.

Well, the high temp super conductor research is extremely speculative and not at all practical. Thats not to say it isn't interesting and doesn't raise interesting questions, it is and it does.

The first problem is the practicality. The superconductivity they are reporting happens where two tiny grains of graphite meet (the soaking and baking part is, essentially, just to get them to meet in the right way, though I suppose trapped water molecules could also play a roll). Disturbing that interface destroys the superconductivity. There's no way to wire two points together using this effect, which makes it essentially useless from a practicality standpoint.

Which leads directly to the research's speculative nature. They can't wire two points together (not even tiny, tiny lengths) so there's no way to actually measure the resistance. They are claiming superconductivity based on an observed phase transition in magnetic properties when a field is applied. The transition they see is consistent with superconductivity, but most people wouldn't call it a silver bullet, "yes we are absolutely sure" kind of evidence. It could be some other effect we don't know about, in which case - NEATO! something new to study, or it could be superconductivity, in which case - NEATO! we've proved room temperature superconductors are empirically possible, we have an example to study which might pave the way.

A path from this to practical room temperature superconductivity, though speculative, is obvious. Fuse buckytubes every hundred atoms or so. Anneal in hydrogen or water or whatever. The fusing holds the tubes in a fixed spatial relation, and where they touch between fused points superconductivity occurs. Braid the stuff together in long ropes, and "Voila!" superconducting wire.

Your buckyball still isn't superconducting, just the regions where the two buckyballs are interfacing. So the route has to go through a research phase where we figure out what is so special about the interface between the two, then another research phase to determine if it's physically possible to string those regions together in a way that produces superconductivity over a usable distance. Then another phase where we try to figure out how actually construct the design we came up with in the last time.

This is Slashdot. Logic and reason have no place in speculative discussions about the future here!

You are right that it's *highly* speculative... but it's still pretty cool to consider... most of the time when we talk about "high temperature supeconductors", we're still talking about -70'C or colder. Some ceramics have limited superconductivity at temperatures of -50'C... to my (limited) knowledge, this is the first time anybody's observed superconductivity anywhere near room temperature. Of course geeks ar

You can get superconductivity at room temperature by varying other parameters too (generally to levels that are even harder to create/maintain than low temperature). I seem to remember an article on slashdot a couple years ago discussing room temperature superconductivity, only problem it required the material to be under several hundred thousand atmospheres of pressure.

Maybe something similar is happening here... the evaporating water causing suction at nanoscopic scales that nevertheless applies enormous

But room tempereature superconducting in graphite have been observed before, several times. Always with a very low signal to noise, but I guess the cheer number of observations is enough to hint that there is something there. It happens on several experimental setups, with several different arrangements of crystals, and nobody is able to point exactly what is superconducting, or how. That article is yet another step into understanding the phenomenum.

...room-temperature superconductivity to be true. But this just feels an awful lot like polywater, cold fusion and the like -- something that would be amazingly cool, but has ambiguous or conflicting or incomplete evidence, and disappears when you look at it crosswise.

Don't hold your breath.
There are three phenomena associated with superconductivity: zero resistance, the Meissner effect, and a superconducting phase transition. Only the last one has been observed so far in the graphite-based superconductor. But it's my understanding that it's only the first two that are practically useful. Either of the first two effects observed on a macroscopic level at room temperatures or above, and that is tractable to scale, would be utterly revolutionary, and the long-term impact on industrialized society would likely be beyond anything we've yet conceived.

Here is the abstract [uni-leipzig.de] from the work done in Leipzig. Also if you happen to have access to Wiley Online Library or Wiley InterScience you can read the full publication here [wiley.com], I don't so I am not sure if that gets you all the way there or not.

Alves et al reported [Nature Materials 7, 574 (2008)] high conductivity (metallic-like, not superconductive) at a junction obtained by simply placing the faces of thin crystals of two very poor organic conductors (TTF and TCNQ) into contact and allowing the crystals to self-laminate.

Interesting questions arise, including whether the conductivity is nearly 2-dimensional rather than fully 3-dimensional.